There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.

Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.

One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.